Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

Post by foldr » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

joosters wrote: post #9

foldr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that. This doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation. Take one particular example of a structurally ambiguous sentence of English: "The company couldn't make the car fast enough". The two meanings are completely distinct (speed of production vs. speed of the car). There's no fuzziness about this distinction out there in the world. The speed at which a ca…

And yet, in the real world, people could use that sentence as part of a discussion without causing any confusion or ambiguity. Because sentences don’t exist on their own, they have a wider context which can focus their meaning. Human language is succinct. We don’t generally say twenty words when ten would do. If the context made your example sentence clear, why would a speaker need to add any words to clarify it furt…

Yes, obviously. I am not saying that there is anything bad about structural ambiguities of this sort.

Post by FeepingCreature » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #60

FeepingCreature wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much effort wasted based on trying to derive fundamental meaning from coincident attributes of our brains' neurological implementation of abstract concepts. "The transition is wherever your 'pile' classifier neuron fires."

I think you are selling at least some of the philosophers short. What is a pile and isn't a pile is not entirely subjective (i.e. we all agree that 1 grain of sand is not a pile), nor is it entirely objective (in the sense that different people will probably draw the line at different places). On top of that, the transition even for a single individual is not abrupt. Understanding and dissecting these sorts of ambigu…

Yeah but those properties are exactly what you would expect from imitation learned fuzzy neuronal classifiers. As such, they have no deeper meaning than saying "does the fact that the deep learning model thinks this traffic cone is a penguin reveal to us a deep truth about traffic cones and penguins?" No.. It just used some shortcut feature that's not universally applicable. Just like us.

The heap classifier works to tell that obvious heaps are heaps. It works to tell that single items are not heaps. In between, there is no meaning but noise.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is